


Fragmented

by by_heart



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 14:01:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19401796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/by_heart/pseuds/by_heart
Summary: Post s4 finale. Sara feels like there's something important that she's forgotten. Or perhaps someone. She can't quite put her finger on it, but she needs to remember whatever seems to have escaped her memory.





	Fragmented

**Author's Note:**

> Post-finale, canon compliant.
> 
> Thanks to [unwittingcatalyst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwittingcatalyst) for reading through this for me!

“Gideon,” Sara called out quietly in the darkness. She had been tossing and turning for quite some time. A vague and very unfocused thought nagged at her throughout the day and she couldn’t seem to push it out of her mind enough to sleep. 

“Yes, Captain?”

Sara tucked her arm behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. “Have you ever experienced deja vu?”

“That phenomenon is created by a brief lapse in electrical conduction from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. Information is meant to arrive in both locations simultaneously, but for some reason, it reaches one side faster than the other. The brain interprets this as having experienced an identical scenario twice, creating the feeling that you’ve been there before,” Gideon explained. “While I am able to learn and experience quite similarly to any human brain, a lapse in electrical conduction, for me, would simply be re-routed and re-organized appropriately.”

“So… no, then?”

“What’s troubling you, Captain?”

Sara didn’t answer right away, her mind so felt so jumbled that she wasn’t sure where to start or how to explain to a super computer the feeling of trying to remember something that’s been forgotten. “It’s like I’m forgetting something important. Something serious. Like I’ve left the stove on or lost my keys.” She kicked the covers off and fidgeted, the process of trying to decode the lost memory fragment waking her up more. “It’s like the haze after using the memory flasher - the memories are gone but sometimes the memory of having memories is still there.” She lifted her head from the pillow then. “Nobody used the flasher on me, right?”

“No, not in over a year.”

She scrunched her face up, thinking. “Who used it on me last year?”

“You used it on yourself and instructed me never to tell you why.”

“That’s slightly disturbing,” Sara noted before letting herself drop back onto the pillow. “But I’ll go ahead and trust myself on that one.” She was quiet for a minute before opening her mouth again. “But that doesn’t explain why I feel like I’ve forgotten something very recently. It’s so intense that my stomach is in knots.”

“Well I can tell you that the stove is, indeed, turned off,” Gideon offered. 

Sara chuckled softly. “Yeah, thanks.” 

“There are no birthdays coming up, no anniversaries or holidays, nothing out of the ordinary happening in Star City in 2019, no aberrations or anachronisms that need your attention, and everyone on your team is well and healthy.”

While she appreciated the gesture, Sara knew that Gideon could list off possibilities for hours and still wouldn’t come across the right one, the one that answered the questions Sara couldn’t put into words. 

“It’s nothing like that. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I feel like I promised someone I’d call them and never did.” She sighed heavily. “When I first joined the team, I missed Laurel so much. But it was okay because I knew that she wasn’t missing me; Rip told us we’d be returning to the moment we left. It was okay that I hadn’t seen her in months because at least she wouldn’t be waiting that long,” Sara tried to explain. “This kinda feels like that. Like I miss someone who has no idea that I’ve even left.” 

“I miss you, and all of the Legends, when you’re not here,” Gideon began, “but what you’re describing… isn’t something that’s happened to me before. I’m sorry, Captain, I wish I could be of more help.” 

“Gideon,” Sara chuckled, “that’s exactly how someone who has experienced this would respond, too.” 

She reached for the sheet that was still tangled around her feet and tried to get comfortable once again. Turning on her side, she tucked a pillow against her body and tried to focus on her breathing, slowing each breath deliberately with the hope it would trick her mind into believing she was tired enough to sleep. 

After ten minutes, she felt like her body was finally surrendering, the tight, uneasy feeling in her stomach loosening. 

Then she jolted, groaning groggily as she squeezed her eyes shut tight. 

“Perhaps I could turn a movie on for you so your mind has something else to focus on?” Gideon suggested.

Sara sighed heavily, and sat up. She pushed her back against the headboard and pulled a pillow onto her lap as she drew her knees up slightly, settling in. 

“Is it possible that changing the timeline could erase someone from my memory but still leave enough of an impression that I feel this… out of sorts?” Sara wondered, her voice betraying her attempt to hide the level of anxiety she was feeling. 

“Aside from Doom World, I don’t recall any instance where you’ve made a change that significant to the timeline in which you weren’t protected by the temporal zone or a parallel timeline. And when you prevented Doom World from happening, you hadn’t erased anyone from your memory; you simply prevented the need for a future version of yourself to exist. While that left you with no memories of Doom World, you are still aware of the events that transpired and what was accomplished.” 

Sara nodded, agreeing, then looked up at the ceiling. Though she couldn’t see in the near pitch black darkness of her room, she felt like she had to look somewhere sometimes when she addressed Gideon. And her all-knowing, omniscient-ness often compelled Sara to look skyward to face the AI. “Is it possible that you could have information disappear from your memory in a similar fashion?”

“Well,” Gideon pondered, “outside of the temporal zone, I do have some vulnerabilities to timeline changes similar to humans.”

“Give me a ‘for instance’,” Sara insisted, feeling like this could open up the possibility of finding answers. 

“For instance, in May of 2016, Rex Tyler visited to give you a message from Mister Rory from the future. Mister Rory had no recollection of that conversation because it happened to him in the future, a future that was changed. Likewise, I have no memory of meeting Mister Tyler on the Waverider or traveling to help him deliver a message because that happened to a future Waverider, not to me.”

Sara’s back straightened at the hope that there was a real explanation for what she was feeling. “So potentially, this someone or something I’ve forgotten, it might be a leftover memory from a changed timeline? A timeline that even you can’t remember?”

As Sara looked ahead, she saw Gideon standing in the doorway, nodding a confirmation to her theory. 

“I believe you could be on the right track, Captain Lance.” Then she turned to her left, looking at the woman leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

\-----

Sara bolted upright. “Gideon!” She groped around in the darkness, a bit disoriented, until she found the lamp on the bedside table. 

“I’m here, Captain.”

She turned the light on and pushed her hair from her face. “Did we talk before I went to sleep?”

“You were describing the frustrations of deja vu,” Gideon supplied.

Sara scrambled to her feet and crossed the room to face a monitor. “What else?”

“Nothing else, Captain Lance. You finally managed to fall asleep after that. It seemed as though you had worked through the problem enough to relax.”

Sara shook her head, now feeling frantic. “My dream,” she pointed to her head. “That thing you do where you watch our dreams….”

“I merely monitor you in the event that details and patterns in your dreams may help better understand your waking emotional state.”

“Do that,” Sara practically shouted. “However it works, I need to know more about the dream I just had.” She began pacing back and forth in front of the screen. “In my dream, you told me it was possible that there had been a change to the timeline and that the thing I’m struggling to remember might be a stray fragment of a real memory.” She stopped walking and stared into the monitor. “Is that true?”

“It is,” Gideon confirmed as she began displaying pictures and charts on the digital screen that Sara was focused on. “While I’m unsure what event may have occurred that you’re remembering that I’m unable to, it is technically possible that the human brain might not completely wipe clean after a change in the timeline. Depending on what that change was and how it affected you before it happened.”

Sara put her hand to her temple as she tried to focus on the bits of the dream that were already beginning to fade even though she had just woken up. The harder she tried to remember it clearly, the faster the images seemed to distort in her mind. “Is there any way to create a visual from whatever you collected in my head?” She was grasping at straws but she needed to see it again.

“It’s not easy, but I can try,” she offered as the screen changed again. “The impact the images have on the lesson the dream is trying to convey determine how clearly I’m able to reassemble them in the form of a picture.”

The box on the monitor was mostly black with bits of static crackling in and out. 

“I’m sorry, Captain, but there’s not much here to see.”

Sara shook her head and tapped on her chin as she continued to stare ahead, shifting her weight back and forth on her feet impatiently. “There’s something there,” she said confidently. “I don’t remember what I saw, but I know I saw something.”

Gideon sighed. “I’m afraid it’s all….” She paused and a grey shape began forming on the screen. “Wait. There is something here.”

Sara held her breath as she watched the faint outline of a person begin to materialize. It took several seconds before she could even tell whether the person was a man or woman. “Who is that?”

“I believe that’s me,” Gideon said as the picture continued to fill in. “You said you were talking to me in your dream. You must have visualized me the way you saw me in Captain Hunter’s mind.”

“There’s more,” Sara said. She tapped on the screen, knowing it wouldn’t do anything but unable to stop herself all the same. “There was something else. You turned away from me and said something.”

Both were silent as little grey dots continued to flicker all over the screen, creating vague shapes that showed the room to be Sara’s quarters. 

Sara gasped as a small cluster of red pixels formed. She jabbed her finger at the spot, leaving a smudged fingerprint on the screen. “What’s that? What does the red spot mean?”

“Most people dream primarily in black and white. But it seems some small portion of this particular dream was seen in color.”

“Well that means it’s important, right?” She began growing extremely impatient again. 

“Not necessarily. You might have a better idea of the implications when more of the picture fills out.”

Sara took a step backward and breathed in slowly, deeply, trying to calm herself. She couldn’t will a quantum computer to work any faster than it already was, and the fact that she could see her dream recreated like a movie was miraculous, she knew. But she was so close to figuring out what had been pulling at her mind yesterday that she could barely stand the wait. 

As the figure in the image next to the rendering of Gideon began to clarify, Sara felt like the wind had been knocked out of her and she planted her hand on the wall next to the display as she leaned in closer. “Gideon, search the timeline for her.”

“Already working on it.” A second box appeared, scrolling rapidly through names and faces, displaying Gideon’s progress.

Sara stared in disbelief as the last of the image fell into place. The woman had dark hair, wore comfortable clothes and combat boots, and around her neck hung a unique necklace with a bright red stone.

The search box stopped and a face flashed with a name below it. 

“Her name is Zari Tomaz,” Gideon said.

The corner of Sara’s mouth tugged upward slightly as she continued to study the images before her. “We called her Z.”


End file.
